What do we mean when we talk about “sex”? Are we talking about gender, genitals, intercourse? Foucault says no. According to him, though gender, genitals, and intercourse certainly relate to and have something to do with sex, these things are not exactly sex itself.
-Ziev
In giving us the history of sexuality, Foucault focuses on the policies that power structures during different times held regarding sexuality and how this affected and regulated sexuality itself. Part II of The History of Sexuality especially explores how the power structure affected and regulated the discourse of sex and the affect that this discourse had on sexuality.
Is it possible, though, that this power structure’s regulation of sexuality had the most acute affect on the power structure itself? We can assume that the power structure consisted of the Church and aristocracy. The Church dictated what sexual behavior was looked upon favorably, for example using it only to procreate, and not engaging in intercourse until marriage. With this cultural ideal established, and assuming that the reward of heavenly paradise was true, one would think that it is the aristocracy who adhered to this dictum most religiously and were therefore the group with the highest proportion of its members ascending to heaven rather than being punished for sexual deviation and promiscuity by the fiery embers of hell.
In this case, then, we assume that the lower classes who did not belong to this sexually pure aristocracy did not ascend into God’s hands as frequently. The lower classes were more promiscuous, and to the power structure, this is likely part of the reason as to why they were “low” in the first place. As we know through countless accounts in history and depictions in books and film of the aristocracy in the Victorian era, the sexual behavior of the aristocracy did not often adhere to the principals dictated by the church, and indeed the sexual nature of humans often won and resulted in mistresses, illegitimate children, and scandal.
Foucault must realize of course that the sexual doctrine of the Victorian era was not adhered to in any way besides discourse. I think there is an obvious difference between discourse and behavior, or discourse and action. The way I understand it, the reason Foucault devotes a whole chapter to discourse is because it was the only platform in which the sexual doctrine of the Victorian era was adhered to. Though sex outside the cultural doctrine of acceptability must have been constant, discourse is among what reflects the culture of a time and place most clearly. Of course I, like Foucault, am speaking in huge generalities about the West during a certain cultural era.
What this does in my mind is raise the question: If human sexual behavior has remained relatively constant despite differences in discourse and culture (proof: a steady exponential increase in human population for thousands of years), in what ways does analyzing this discourse reveal something about the sexuality of our own culture? I would be very interested in knowing the answer.
-Ziev
Upon reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Elizabeth Grosz’s Space, Time and Perversion, I found myself drawing upon empathy during my attempt to grapple with the texts. Though I possess an idea of what feminism “is,” namely- the empowerment of women, these readings are my first exposure to real philosophical texts written by feminist thinkers expressing advanced ideas and theories. According to their own description, as when Butler suggests that we are in a period of “postfeminism,” these texts seem to be written in the wake of the popular feminist thought of the past.
Since I am unfamiliar with all feminist thought, I decided to approach the ideas within Butler and Grosz’s books as isolated ones, and took their word for it when they referenced past ideas or those of other theorists. As a male, I come from what Butler would likely call a “phallogocentric” frame of reference. Thus, my way of attempting to understand the reading relied upon empathizing with Butler’s position and thinking about “real world evidence” for the abstract concepts she defined.
This was not made easier by the academic’s penchant for using many polysyllabic words and the insertion of several clauses into her sentences, as she does with this gem: “The prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism” (pg. 5). What?
In regards to the ideas themselves, I enjoyed the fundamentally deconstructive nature of Butler’s discourse. Take this thought for example, “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (pg. 10).
I agree with this idea, if I am interpreting it correctly, because there is evidence for it in the real world. We attach gender to sex: males have one set of genitals, females another (or in the case of some theorists which Butler mentions, females “lack” a set of genitals). However, “Men” who identify as female and “women” who identify as male have, in the course of establishing their identities, detached their sex from their gender, which effectively detaches the limitation placed upon them by the sex-gender dichotomy, and adopted the identity that they feel is correct.
I also found Butler’s questions regarding the politics of feminism to be interesting. She asks if achieving political unity as “women” is possible when this category of identification may not exist. She also asks whether unity is even necessary for effective political action (pg. 21). This goes back to deconstruction, as well as the structuralist anthropology which Butler references. According to Butler’s interpretation of Claude Levi-Strauss, the biological female is subsequently transformed into the subordinated cultural woman (47).
I believe that as humans, we do have a natural tendency to place each other into such categories, and I think that were we to destroy all these constructed categories, we would look at ourselves as the organic pile of tissue and bones that we actually are. I also find to be correct Butler’s disagreement with feminists and anthropologists who look to cultures of the past in order to find “proof” of a female-dominated society (which Butler identifies as the “imaginary ‘before’”) that would contradict the notion that females are intended, biologically, to be subordinate. I don’t think that this is productive for feminism’s political goals, which I generally think of as an increase in the status of women within society.
Though I am not qualified or knowledgeable enough to theorize about what feminism should be, for the sake of reflecting upon my first exposure to feminist theory, I believe that in their discourse, feminists should keep their political goals in mind and resist abstractedly theorizing for theorizing’s sake. If the pursuit of a theory does not lead to a practical improvement, it should be dropped in favor of discussions that will. I am certain, of course, that many would be inclined to disagree.